Feeling Touched Out by Your Twins? You’re Not Alone!

The additional sensory input of having two babies at the same developmental stage can be a lot on our nervous systems as twin parents. Inside this podcast episode, a mental health specialist and twin mom shares why this happens and what we can do about it. 

Ever have one of those days with your twins where you feel like you might implode if you hear another cry? Or another “mama”? Or if one more tiny person or creature (hey, dog parents) touches you?

You’re not alone. When you have twins, your sensory processing system can become overwhelmed twice as fast. And it may leave you feeling depleted, stressed out, enraged, or even guilty. 

Because this is such a widespread challenge among twin parents and parents of multiples, Twiniversity founder Natalie Diaz decided to reach out to an expert on this subject: Kristen Emberly, a former mental health therapist working in early childhood mental health who now works with parents of twins. 

Below is the transcript from a portion of this interview which was originally published on the Twiniversity Podcast in October 2024. 

Read through the transcript below, or catch the full episode on our YouTube channel!

Nat: Good morning, Kristen. Thank you so much for playing with us today.

Kristen: Thank you so much for allowing me to be here. I’m so excited.

Nat: Well, listen, that we can pass up this opportunity because there is something that I’ve been dying to talk about. And you were the person that I want to talk to about this. So it comes up a lot in our groups and online, like, and we hear the saying even in social, that moms are just “touched out.” 

Of course, this affects your kiddos, this affects your partners. Because there are so many levels to this whole kind of being touched out. And you being kind of the person that, I don’t want to say I’m painting you into a corner of mental health. But for this, for today, that’s what we’re going to do. I really know that if there is anybody that could speak about this fluently and could really also empathetically understand, it’s you. 

Kristen: Oh, thank you.

Nat: I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m so happy that you could help us, because seriously, we’re just freaking touched out. So give us a little bit of how you got to where you are today. Tell us about the most delicious twinnies in the entire West Coast. Yeah.

Give us, give us a little background.

Kristen: I will do that. Thank you. Yeah. So I started out as a mental health therapist specializing in early childhood mental health. So that was birth to five, working with children with pretty complex needs and their families. And so I started that out, really enjoyed the work and learned a lot about our sensory systems, a lot about children’s mental health, how to support attachment, how to build relationships.

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I really loved that work. And then I became a mom to my oldest singleton. And then once I became a mom, I realized that I didn’t really know a lot. I thought I knew a lot. I was trained. I had the experience. And then when I became a mom, I needed more. So I got additional training to support moms and work in maternal mental health. And then in 2020, at 20 weeks, we found out we were having twins.

So we had multiple scans before where a whole baby was missed. And then in January 2020, found out it was twins. And then the pandemic hit in March. My boys were born in April. And so that really put me on the train of I need to follow my passion.

Time is short. I have no time with three boys now.

And so I really started to focus and prioritize maternal mental health and have really fallen in love with supporting twin moms because I know how hard it is. It was the most humbling, hardest, depleting experience that I’ve ever had.

And it was the most wonderful at the same time. So both of those things were true at the exact same time. And I’ve quickly found myself in survival mode, burnt out, overwhelmed, and overstimulated.

And finally came to the point where I was like, this can’t be it.

I can’t keep living like this. This is my one precious life. These are my kiddos’ moments that I’m missing because I’m burnt out. 

And so I worked really hard to be able to get out of survival mode, take care of myself, understand what I need, set expectations, boundaries, all sorts of things. And now I’m doing that for twin moms. And one of the things that I support twin moms with is exactly what you’re talking about is this feeling of being touched out. And people are talking about it more, but sometimes we don’t fully understand.

So if it’s okay, I’d love to explain a little bit what’s happening for us, and then we can go and talk more about maybe what to do or things like that. But so we each have our own sensory system. And so our sensory system is like the basic ones, and one of them is touch. But each of us has what’s essentially like a cup. 

We have a certain amount of cup, and these things can pour in. So we can get certain amount of touches, and then all of a sudden, our cup is full. If we don’t pour out our cup by like taking care of ourselves, resting, taking breaks, resetting, reconnecting with ourselves, all of the things that are incredibly difficult to do as twin moms, then our cup is perpetually full.

And when our cup is full, we get to that point where it’s like, if one other thing touches me, I’m going to lose it.

I just cannot handle, I cannot take one more thing. I’m getting like goosebumps remembering these experiences and how it truly feels like and how awful it is because it’s your babies.

And you want to be able to touch them or it’s your partner or it’s your other kiddo. And you want to be able to connect with them, but you are so full that it’s almost aversive. And sometimes what we can do is like, when our cup is so full, our body is like full stop. We cannot do this anymore. 

And then sometimes we have those big reactions or we have the like, I just need to go. I need to take a minute. And we’re reacting in ways maybe that we don’t want to, but it’s because our cup is too full. To take it even further, we all have different sizes of cups. Your cup may be really full.

My cup is a little bit smaller for being touched. And to make it even more complicated is that the light touch, the gentle touch of our babies or the little fingertips, like whatever it is, is alerting to our nervous system.

So when that touch comes at us, our nervous system instantly has this automatic reaction of danger.

And then our brain has to go, oh, wait, no, that’s not danger. It’s not a snake that’s coming up behind me or a predator. It’s my baby, and we’re okay. But that’s so taxing to our brains to be able to do that. And sometimes we hit our limit because we’re not able to take care of ourselves, to get rest, and we have these reactions.

And I think also it totally makes sense. And I think for every sensory, I don’t want to say like, like what every sense, we have our own cups for that. So there are people who can’t talk anymore. There are people who close their eyes.

So with every sense, there is a different cup.

And I feel when you have infants, especially the whole being touched out gets full so quick because you’re really not talking to them as much as you would be.

Let’s say if you were giving lectures all day and you were a college professor and you had 15 classes that day, everybody’s going to have a different threshold of tolerance. And so between families, we don’t ever really acknowledge that we have a threshold of tolerance because as parents, we’re just expected to do everything for everyone all of the time. That cup sneaks up on you and you don’t even realize that not only is it full, it is flowing over, it has flooded the downstairs.

We have to now call a city inspector, we have to have the water company come turn off the water. It gets so full so fast. And if you don’t pay attention or at least acknowledge what’s going on, you’re just going to have a flood. 

Nat: So how could we start to realize that our cup is getting full?

We have, of course, common knowledge like, oh, I’m touching something. Yes, this is a touch. But when it comes to that we’re getting near the top, are there things that we may look for? Are there signs that we’re getting to the top of our cup?

Kristen: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a great question. And you’re exactly right. Like everybody’s cup is different. And it’s different when our kids are at different ages. When my kiddos were infants, my boys just turned four. So they’re a little bit older and my oldest is six and a half. Right now, my cup that’s always full is noise.”

They are loud, they are wild, and they do repetitive noises that fill up my cup so fast. But when we’re working with infants, it’s often the touch because we’re holding our babies, we’re nursing, we’re burping, we’re getting spit on us, throw up, all sorts of things. There’s just a lot of sensory input.

One of my favorite things to say is, twins are a sensory nightmare. Our bodies have to filter out so much stuff because our twins, there’s two of them in the same stage. It’s a lot.

And there are signs that our body gives us when we are reaching that limit. And we can talk about those. The thing that I think it’s most important to know though, is that oftentimes we’re ignoring these signals.

They’re there. Everybody’s body is providing these signals. That’s just part of our nervous system and how our bodies work.

Our body wants to protect us and wants us to be safe. But what happens often with twins is that we have to keep going.

Our twins don’t stop.

They’re not just like, hey, mom, I see you need a break. I’m going to just chill for a minute. Like, at least in my experience, my kids aren’t doing that. Yeah, great. And so what happens is our body is giving us these signals, but when we’re stuck in burnout, in survival mode, in overwhelm over stimulation, we ignore those signals. We disconnect from our body.

We’re perpetually dehydrated. Our body is saying, hey, we’re thirsty, take a drink, but we just keep going. And so our body is giving us these signals that were touched out.

We start to get really brain foggy. Our brain is just like, we can’t process any more things. Or we’ll see things like when your startle reflex gets really intense. So like when someone does touch you, a light touch, we’re like having this really big reaction when maybe we don’t need to. And so we can see like our reactions are disproportionate to the sensory input, our current experience. We’re maybe overreacting…

And sometimes on the opposite, to make it even more complicated, we can underreact. So we can go into like this freeze mode where we’re constantly kind of just like checking out. We’re doomscrolling on our phone.

We’re like trying to just like our brain is foggy. We’re just trying to freeze.

So we can go into like essentially two ways of coping. We can like go up into what’s called hyperarousal or go down into hypoarousal. So hyperarousal is where we get really these big reactions. We get this sense of urgency.

We get this feeling like we got to do all of the things. Now we just got to go, go, go, go, go. And then when we go down into hypoarousal, then that’s the one that we just like everything slow.

We’re just kind of stuck, we’re frozen, we’re not really able to do much.

And so this is our nervous system’s natural reaction to all of this sensory input. But what we’re, what our body is doing is trying to give us these messages and trying to say like, hey, slow down, stop.

We need, we need to take care of ourselves. Does that make sense?

Nat: That totally does. But you could have the high high and the low low within the same day.

Kristen: Exactly. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not like a very clear black and white system. Like we respond differently to different stressors.

So in one situation, you may go high, high, high and a different situation can’t even be like 10 minutes later, you may go low, low, low. So it’s just depends upon the stressor and how our nervous system is reacting. And so when I work with twin moms, one of the things that I focus on is like, what does like when you’re feeling good, what does that actually look like?

Like, let’s be really specific and define, like when you are like, you know what? I think I’m feeling all right today. 

Like, what does that look like? What does that feel like? Because our job is to get back in there. Our job is not to be calm all the time and to be perfect.

Our job is to kind of stay within what we would call like our regulation. 

Like we want to be regulated so we can be the parents that we want to be. We can take care of ourselves. We can problem solve. We can be, we can organize and plan and do all of the things that we have to do as twin moms, but when we’re constantly dysregulated, it’s really hard to do that. It is. And how the heck do you do that? Right.

Nat: So at Twiniversity, I know we’ve had a lot of talks about like, you know, parenting timeouts. And it’s okay to just say, I just need a second and it gives you a chance to regroup. As long as the twinnies are safe, even if they’re crying, just let them cry so that you can hold yourself back together.

But there are definitely moments, and it’s not only with the twinnies, it’s with our partners too, right? And you were talking about like overreacting and like when you get that touch. So like if you had a whole day and you didn’t get to have any timeouts during the day and your partner comes home, and so your partner literally just tries to like give you a hug or whatever, you have this very instinctual reaction to pull away, now we’re dealing with that our partner could have a sense of rejection.

And so with that, then you’re like, okay, my body was just trying to protect itself.

I maybe overreacted against my will, but now I have to go clean up that mess. So here we go.

Yeah. I want to try to figure out a way to put kind of like the cart before the horse. Like what could we do during the day to never have an overflow? And yes, of course, it’s going to be impossible to follow everything by the letter of the law, because there’s no way that we could do that.

But is there something that we could do in tiny little bits and pieces during the day, whether it’s take, you know, kind of mental health inventory, whether it literally is to go to the bathroom with the door closed, that I joke about a lot. 

One of the things that we could do each day to prevent getting to that point where we’re just going to have additional messes to clean later.

Kristen: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Because you’re describing like the reality of what it’s like day to day, right? Like where we react and now we have to repair and do that. And it just adds another thing on to our list of what we want to do.

And so as Twin Moms, I think one of the things that we try to focus on as much as possible is prevention. Because when we know, when we get to that point where the chaos ensues, like it’s incredibly difficult. And so we want to do prevention.

So I appreciate this question and I love it. And I will say, unfortunately, there’s not like a quick fix or a magic pill. If there was, like I would be first in line for that pill. I’d be alone with people. You would be manufacturing it.

Nat: Yes. It would be the first Twiniversity product that exists in the United States. I’d be right with you on that one. 

Kristen: Yep. And so it is a process. So I just want to set realistic expectations because honestly, one of the biggest factors for us as Twin Moms for overwhelm and anxiety is unrealistic expectations is that we’re expecting to be perfect moms, take care of our kids, do all of the things, do our house things, be able to work or stay at home or whatever we’re doing. 

We have incredibly high expectations on moms these days, and it is so harmful for us. So the very first thing we talk about is we need to acknowledge that first we’re here, we’re in survival…

The above transcript is only a sampling of the full podcast episode: “I’m Touched Out!” Dealing with the epic struggles twin moms face with Kristen Emberly.

Want to listen to this full episode on feeling “touched out”? 

Listen to the full episode here on Apple Podcasts!

Want to read more about how to handle feeling touched out and the challenges of regulation with twins? Check out these articles too: 

• Co-Regulation Techniques for Twins of All Ages
• How to Deal With Twins Crying at the Same Time
• How to Curb Your Mom Rage (or Dad Rage) as a Twin Parent

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